Two numerals, six seven, are the dictonary.com word of 2025

11 November 2025

67 has been named word of the year by dictionary.com:

If you’re the parent of a school-aged child, you might be feeling a familiar vexation at the sight of these two formerly innocuous numerals. If you’re a member of Gen Alpha, however, maybe you’re smirking at the thought of adults once again struggling to make sense of your notoriously slippery slang. And if it’s a surprise to you that 67 (pronounced “six-seven”) is somehow newsworthy, don’t worry, because we’re all still trying to figure out exactly what it means.

I’m all for it. I use the phrase constantly. I say six, seven, then pause. I resume by adding, eight, nine, ten. That way people think it’s an anger management technique.

Blogging and anger management goes hand-in-hand after all.

I would prefer it if 67 were styled six-seven though, so that it looks like an actual word. But then again I think presenting numerals as a word is part of the point of using the term in the first place.

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language, trends

alive internet theory, bringing the dead internet back to life

11 November 2025

alive internet theory, all lower case, by Spencer Chang:

alive internet theory is a séance with this living internet. Resurrecting tens of millions of digital artifacts from the Internet Archive, visitors are immersed in a relentless barrage of human expression as they travel through the life of the web as we created it — every image, video, song, and text uploaded by a real person on the web.

This is the sort of séance I can get into.

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history, technology, web design

Star Trek reboot, Kelvin timeline, movie series cancelled

10 November 2025

Tatiana Siegel, Brent Lang, and Matt Donnelly, writing for Variety:

The hope is to have a fresh “Star Trek” movie, though the studio has moved on from the idea of bringing back Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and the rest of the ensemble from the J.J. Abrams reboot.

The news probably comes as no surprise to Star Trek fans who were nonetheless hopeful of a fourth film in the Kelvin timeline series, which kicked off with Star Trek in 2009, directed by J.J. Abrams.

There are likely numerous reasons for the apparent cancellation, with poor box office takings for 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, the last film in the series, being among them. The tragic death, also in 2016, of Anton Yelchin, who portrayed Pavel Chekov, a key character, might have been a factor as well.

The decision to not make any more instalments in the Kelvin series is not thought to be the end of the Star Trek stories however, and it is believed producers are considering other film and TV ideas.

Reading the Variety article reminded me the first of the rebootedTrek movies had its world premier at the Sydney Opera House, in 2009. While many of the cast and production crew were present, some sixteen-hundred “tastemakers” were also invited to the screening.

As a moniker for influencers, tastemakers didn’t last long, but many of those present would have been conveying their impressions of the new film through their blogs, and possibly Twitter.

How times change, regardless of which timeline you are on.

The Rot, new work by Evelyn Araluen, Australian poet

5 November 2025

The Rot, by Indigenous Australian author Evelyn Araluen (Instagram page), follows up 2021’s Dropbear, which won the 2022 Stellar Prize.

The Rot is a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes and abject injustices of the world. A liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism, these poems expose fraying nerves and tendons of a speaker refusing to avert their gaze from the death of Country, death on Country, and the bloody violence of settler colonies here and afar.

Non-existent but realistic looking Australian phone numbers for film and TV

5 November 2025

I don’t know how this works in other countries, but the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), a statutory authority that regulates communications and media services locally, has allocated a range of non-existent phone numbers for use in things like films and TV shows.

Actually, this is the first I’ve heard of these numbers, and have given little thought to those I see in a local movie or show. I’ve always assumed producers use numbers that appear to have obviously been made up, like maybe, 1234-5678, or something.

It’s a great initiative though, productions can make use of realistic looking Australian phone numbers even though they are fictitious. I imagine film and TV show makers outside of Australia can use the numbers as well, in the event they need an Australian phone number in their work.

Too complicated for algorithms: the universe cannot be a simulation

3 November 2025

The bus I’m on arrives at an interchange stop but a minute late and misses the connecting service which left a minute earlier than scheduled. The bean grinder at the cafe breaks down just as I arrive.

The door phone at a friend’s apartment is on the blink, and I’m in a phone black spot and unable to call them. The internet connection drops mid way through a bank transaction, and refuses to reconnect for several minutes, leaving me wondering whether the payment went through or not.

A micro-tear in my water bottle partly soaks the contents of my day bag. A succession of late-evening (no less) traffic delays sees us reach the supermarket a minute after closing time. My laptop crashes as I open the lid to resume a session. This is what happened one day.

They’re all minor irritations, but were pretty much consecutive. Of course it was a run of bad luck, yet occasions like these are enough to make me think the universe is a simulation, I’m a Sim, and am being cruelly manipulated by player of the game that is the universe we live in.

I need no longer think that though. An international team of researchers, lead by Dr Mir Faizal of Canada’s University of British Columbia, have found the universe is, in essence, too complicated an entity to be the product of a computer generated simulation:

Their findings, published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, go beyond simply suggesting that we’re not living in a simulated world like The Matrix. They prove something far more profound: the universe is built on a type of understanding that exists beyond the reach of any algorithm.

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astronomy, physics, science

Sydney’s Writers’ Walk to become longer, celebrate other artists

3 November 2025

Located along the shoreline of inner Sydney suburb Circular Quay, Sydney’s Writer’s Walk commemorates well-known authors and playwrights, who are either Australian, or visited the country at some point, with circular plagues set into walkways in the area.

Local writers include Miles Franklin and Peter Carey, while the international cohort is made up of the likes of Rudyard Kipling, and Mark Twain, who were in Australia in 1891, and 1895, respectively.

The Walk was established in 1991, and in 2011 an additional eleven plagues were added, but plans are afoot to add to the Walk in the near future. This makes sense. A bevy of new Australian writers have emerged in the last decade and a half. Numerous notable authors, who were omitted originally, are also in the running for a spot, as are songwriters, who may also be included.

The Sydney’s Writer’s Walk is one of a number of such commemorative walkways in the Sydney area. Others include the Australian Film Walk of Fame, located in Randwick, and the Australian Surfing Walk of Fame, at the beach suburb of Maroubra.

Average at Best, a memoir by Astrid Jorgensen, Pub Choir founder

29 October 2025

Brisbane based Australian musician and singer, and founder of Pub Choir, Astrid Jorgensen (Instagram page), recently published her memoir, Average at Best.

Average, says Jorgensen, is underrated, given how difficult it is to be the best:

By its very nature, ‘best’ is rare and elusive: you’re not going to get much of it in life. And I sure don’t want to miss out on deeply experiencing the fullness of my one precious existence, searching for the sliver of ‘best’.

One of Pub Choirs’ feats was, in August 2023, to assemble nineteen-thousand people across Australia to sing the ever popular Africa, a song recorded by American band Toto in 1982.

AI information summaries eating away at Wikipedia reader base

29 October 2025

Just about every online publisher has experienced a decline in the number of people reading articles and information published on their websites. Search engines presently do such a good job of breaking down the main points of news reports, blog posts, and the like, that seekers of information are seldom reading the material at its source.

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia is no exception, and falls in visitors stand to threaten what is surely an invaluable resource, along with others such as Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What happens if we follow this shift in the way people obtain information to its absurd, yet logical, conclusion? If websites such as Wikipedia, Britannica, along with news sites, and many, many, others, are forced to close because no one visits them anymore, what is going to feed the search engine AI summaries we’ve become accustomed to?

In short, we’re going to see AI summaries eat the web, and then eat themselves. The onus here is on search engines, AKA answer engines, and whatever other services generate AI summaries, to use them more selectively, and wean information seekers off them.

Is that something anyone can see happening? No, I didn’t think so.

ChatGPT Atlas browser: the greatest thing since tabs in Firefox

27 October 2025

Tabbed browsing, was, says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the last significant web browser innovation. Although tabbed browsing didn’t become common place until around 2002, the idea dates back to 1994, with the arrival of InternetWorks, a browser made by BookLink Technologies. Altman seems to be suggesting browsers have barely changed since the early days of the web.

He made the remark during his introduction to ChatGPT Altas, OpenAI’s new web browser, last week. His words made people take notice, but Altman doesn’t seem to know his onions. Atlas is not a web browser, it is an AI-powered aggregator of information, which may, or may not, be accurate.

So far, Atlas is only available on MacOs, meaning I’ve not had a chance to try the innovative “browser” out, but certain aspects of its functionality either baffled or alarmed me, as I watched the OpenAI video presentation. To make use of Atlas, we are required to type out commands or prompts, in strikingly similar fashion to ChatGPT.

That’s not typically how browsers are used, but as I say, Atlas doesn’t seem like a web browser to me anyway. Of more concern is the way Atlas can, potentially, access files on the local drive of your computer, or if you allow it, the contents of your email app. AI scrapers, including no doubt OpenAI’s, have been trawling my website for years probably, but that’s content in the public domain.

AI bots going through what’s in my email app, and doing whatever with it, including training LLMs is another matter entirely. But Atlas is an AI browser, so buyer beware, this is no normal web “browser” if it is even one in the first place. If people want to use it, that’s for them to decide.

What’s more unsettling though, are regular browsers, such as Firefox, morphing into AI-browsers. Mozilla, the manufacturer of Firefox, which I have been using for over twenty years, is not, it seems, introducing a new browser line, instead it is integrating AI features into an existing product.

This is not a good move, we’re all going to end up running clones of Atlas on our devices, whether we like it or not. If Mozilla wants to make an AI-powered browser, fine, but develop a separate product, and let users decide if they want to use it. Leave the original Firefox, whose early predecessor, Phoenix, shipped with those groundbreaking tabs Altman spoke of, back in 2002, as it is.

Somehow I cannot see any of that happening. Firefox is going to become an AI browser whether we like it or not. There is, however a way to opt out of Firefox’s AI functionality, as New Zealand/Aotearoa blogger fLaMEd Fury, has detailed.

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